“How did HP get into such a mess with webOS?” Ed Sutherland asks for Cult of Mac.

“Essentially, the company shot itself in the foot as a parade of managers streamed through the corporate suites in a nightmare scenario reminding one of the worst days of Apple,” Sutherland reports. “Ousted HP CEO Leo Apotheker must take the blame, a former webOS head said.”

Sutherland reports, “Former webOS Community Manager Chuq von Rospach called his last months at HP akin to Apple prior to Steve Jobs. ‘Apple in the worst of days — the dark, damp days of [Michael] Spindler that made you want to wake up screaming, but you couldn’t because you weren’t asleep — were never as bad as these last few months in Leoville,’ von Rospach said. The former executive spent three years at HP.”

So the first generation WebOS tablets didn’t sell, and got bad reviews mostly because of the clunky tablet hardware. HP could have toughened it out and took what they learned to make a better 2nd generation tablet. Instead, they ran straight back to MS Windows, making a complete waste of all the time and money invested in HP having its own modern operating system.

Can you imagine if Apple did the same thing in early 2000’s? If they went back to System 7 and gutted Mac OS X after poor sales and reviews for 10.0 or 10.1? It would have been a huge mistake, to say the least.

1. Putting price points and committees ahead of quality designs.
2. Releasing webOS products before they were ready.
3. Not standing behind their webOS products. (they may have had no choice on this last one because of 1 & 2.)